Advent (5 page)

 
The train crept into motion.

 
‘Come.’

 
It was Miss Grey’s voice. He recognised it from his dreams and yet he’d never properly heard it before, not the actual sound, the disturbance of the air. ‘Come.’ A woman’s voice, as rough and grey as she was, yet with a strength to it, the way her stillness always seemed alarmingly strong. It wanted to prise his eyelids open.

 
‘He comes. They come.’

 
Oh God, he thought. Not now, not here. Don’t look up, he told himself, clenching his teeth. Just don’t look.

 
‘The feasters gather.’

 
He didn’t dare move or scream. He was sitting at one end of a train carriage with people all around him, ordinary people, the other kind. There was nothing he could do.

 
‘The destroyer and his gift. It has begun.’ The words sounded like they were being spat out of her throat. As the train picked up speed, they seemed to rhyme with the clackety-clack of the rails, insistent drumming gibberish. ‘An open door. A closed circle. The sky is open. Drop down, drop down. His mother’s sister is flown. His mother’s sister is gone. His father is named destroyer. He will bear no child. He will bear my burden. It hurts. It hurts!
Otototoi
!
’ Now it was not a rattling scream, but part of the babble. ‘He comes, he comes. The gift, the burden. Truth hurts.
Iew, iew, ohh ohh kakka.
Come. Come.’

 
There was a clumsy rustle opposite. The irritating woman was getting up. Gavin stole a look to be sure and out of the corner of his eye saw her squeezing past the seat in which Miss Grey had appeared. Miss Grey pulled her knees up out of the way, under her cloak. No one was looking at him. Gav raised his eyes cautiously and saw that the woman’s eyes were red and her face drained of colour. She stumbled past the luggage racks and out of the carriage.

 
Miss Grey stared at him, arms round her shins, mouth open but emptied of its freight of meaningless words.

 
‘Come,’ she said.

 
He couldn’t make himself accept that he was seeing her here, under bland electric light, her calloused and filthy bare feet perched on the edge of an upholstered seat. She looked like an escaped extra from a mediaeval costume drama. Under her dark grey cloak she wore shapeless rags. Her bird’s-nest hair was grimy, soot-black. Only in her face was there something vividly, terribly actual, something unfeigned.

 
‘Come,’ she said again.

 
Gav glanced around. No one seemed to be looking his way. The couple across the aisle were absorbed in a crossword. He leaned across the table.

 
‘Go away,’ he said, between his teeth. His cheeks were burning.

 
‘Come,’ she repeated. She was like a bird. Her eyes had that opaque glitter. The word sounded meaningless when she uttered it: just a squawk.

 
‘Please,’ he said. He stared into her face, between the shrouding curtains of her hair. He was afraid he was going to cry. ‘Leave me alone. I can’t take it.’

 
Her head jutted forward. ‘You must take it,’ she said. ‘You must take it. Come to me. Take it.’

 
The sliding door hissed. Without taking her eyes off him, Miss Grey leaned right back and pulled her knees tight, and the nosy woman wriggled back across in front of her to the window seat.

 
Gavin didn’t know where to look. For a moment he’d been sure Miss Grey really had been talking to him, telling him something, when he’d least expected it. In his turmoil of stifled misery he’d barely taken in the words. He turned to the window, cradling his head in his hands, and saw dismal terraced suburbs beginning to appear on the lower slopes of the hills. Get a grip, he told himself. Get a grip.

 
The train was slowing again, coming into a larger town. A few people stood up and began putting on coats, gathering by the end of the carriage. Their chatter and commotion made him feel fractionally safer and he risked a glance around. To his surprise and relief, he saw Miss Grey getting up from her seat.

 
‘He comes,’ he heard her murmur. ‘He comes. They gather. This night you go free.’

 
She eased among the small crowd waiting to get off. The train pulled in. He watched as the press of people carried her out of the carriage. No one was aware of her; she slipped like water into the spaces among them. He pressed his face to the glass to see if he could spot her coming out onto the platform, but she’d disappeared.

 
He felt himself calming down.

 
The carriage was much emptier as they left the station behind. Outside, daylight was fading. There couldn’t be too much more of the journey to go. It occurred to Gav that he could probably find a pair of seats to himself now, where he could sit alone and try to get himself back together.

 
He was just about to act on this thought when he felt fingers on his wrist. The middle-aged woman had leaned across close to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I know I said I wouldn’t bother you, but there’s a little thing I feel I should do and it ought to have a witness. It’s rather embarrassing. I’m not usually this batty, I promise.’

 
He was too dumbfounded to answer at all.

 
‘It has to be just here, as we go over the bridge. It’ll only take a second.’

 
He looked out of the window, helplessly following her gaze. They were riding on a viaduct above the streets, leaving the station behind. The winter afternoon, already dim, was darkening fast. Clouds had sunk and were becoming a fog.

 
‘I’d like you to hear a promise I’m going to make myself. It makes it more official. Bad luck for you that I happened to take this particular seat, hmm? Or something.’ She was talking too rapidly for him to agree to this aloud. ‘Anyway, I hope you don’t mind. I really will shut up after this.’ She extracted a small bottle from her pocket, unscrewing it as she spoke, and poured a little of something that smelled almost but not quite like whisky into the upturned cap. ‘Ah, here we are.’ The town fell away and the train began passing between bulbous steel girders. Gav saw a broad river far below. ‘Right. Here goes. Are you listening?’

 
He couldn’t think of anything to do but nod.

 
‘Right. Good. I, Hester Lightfoot, earnestly and solemnly swear never to cross back over this river again so long as I live.’ She swigged the contents of the cap. ‘On pain of death. There, that should do it. Thank you. If you ever happen to see me east of here again, please feel free to . . . oh I don’t know, push me under a bus or something. Would you like a sip?’

 
The train began to pick up speed, burrowing through the fog.

 
‘No . . . thanks.’

 
She screwed the cap back on. ‘Thank you for putting up with that. That was the Tamar. That river. West of it is all Cornwall. I’m coming home, you see, so I thought I’d make it ceremonial.’ She tapped the open page of the book in her lap. ‘Like the choughs. We’re coming back, for good. I’m Hester, by the way, obviously enough.’ She stuck out her hand.

 
The chuffs? Now Gavin was certain he was sitting at the same table as a lunatic. Grab your bag and move, he told himself, but with her hand right there in front of him he couldn’t.

 
‘Gavin,’ he said, shaking, furious with himself.

 
‘Nice to meet you. They say King Arthur’s soul went into a chough after he died.’ She lifted the book onto the table and pointed. ‘For a long time they left. I think people assumed they were gone for ever, but they returned to Cornwall a few years ago. I’m taking them as a good omen.’

 
Gavin looked down. His vision swam.

 
The picture Hester had her finger on showed a black bird with a beak the colour of embers and legs of the same vivid ruddy orange. He felt suddenly dizzy. The image was an echo of his dreams, the terrible ones of darkness spotted and streaked with fire and alive with battering wings, a piece of his night world torn out of him and thrust under his eyes. Hester’s words rang weirdly in his head:
Good omen, good omen.

 
‘Are you all right?’

 
She had closed the book. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.

 
‘Yeah, fine.’

 
‘I’m sorry. I—’

 
‘’s OK. Forget it.’

 
She studied him with disconcertingly steady interest. ‘All right, then. And now no more madwoman business. I promise.’ She put one finger to her lips and leaned back in her seat.

 
Gavin wasn’t sure how far he could trust that promise, so he closed his eyes, inwardly swearing all the while that if ever he was blessed enough to find himself on another long journey by himself, he’d take a fat book to bury his head in. She was as good as her word, though, which was fortunate, because he found it hard to do a convincing impression of going to sleep. He was so afraid Miss Grey might reappear on the train while his eyes were closed that he couldn’t relax at all. After a while he stopped trying. His phone appeared to have run out of power, like his watch, though he’d charged it that morning. There was nothing to do but gaze out of the window, nowhere else to look.

 
Tight valleys ghosted past in the darkening fog. They stopped at stations that seemed almost abandoned, platforms sunk down in a bank of wet slates and brambles or overlooked by the backs of dreary houses. After a while he heard the announcement that Truro would be the next stop. Most of the few remaining people in the carriage were gathering up belongings. He took his bag and went to stand by the door. Someone had pushed the window down. The wheels hissed loudly and the chill air smelled of wet bark. There was almost no light left in the sky.

 
He saw Hester Lightfoot join the queue by the door, but she seemed to have lost interest in him. In fact, there was an oddly blank look on her face, as if she’d lost interest in everything. Her lips moved a little; she was talking to herself soundlessly. When the train stopped with a slight jerk, she nearly fell over, muttering as she grabbed the luggage rack.

 
Gavin stepped down to the platform, looking around quickly for Auntie Gwen. The station clock showed they were only a couple of minutes late. People hurried, mostly silently, towards the exit, on their way to somewhere more welcoming. He didn’t see his aunt, so he followed the flow out through a ticket hall to the street.

 
A few cars idled in front of the station, but none of them contained Auntie Gwen. The mist that swallowed headlights and rear lights up and down the road might as well have marked the edge of the world.

 
He went back to check the platform again. A clump of people had formed at the far end, most of them school kids, though he noticed Hester Lightfoot there as well. He wanted to avoid the other kids almost as much as he wanted to be out of sight of her, so he sat on the least illuminated bench he could find and waited until the last of the passengers had scurried away.

 
Minutes passed. No Auntie Gwen.

 
The night and the cold closed around him.

Three

Gavin had made
two more trips out of the station to check the road when he returned to the bench to find the crazy woman standing beside it.

 
‘You look like you’ve been stood up,’ she said.

 
He was about to slip behind his usual no-it’s-OK-I’m-fine routine, until it occurred to him that when she was so obviously right, denying it would sound stupid. Besides, he’d been waiting for more than twenty minutes and was beginning to wonder what he was going to do.

 
‘Looks like it, yeah. It’s my aunt. Being late, it’s her thing.’

 
‘Your aunt, did you say?’ An odd frown wrinkled her face for a moment.